Open Access Scholarship / Littérature savante en libre accès

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Springer Nature

Springer Nature was formed in 2015 through the merger of Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, Macmillan Education and Springer Science+Business Media. The company is a leading global research, educational and professional publisher. It describes itself as “the publisher of the world’s most influential journals and a pioneer in the field of open research”. It claims to have over 3000 journals and 7 million articles.

The company offers three publishing platforms; SpringerLink.com, Nature.com and open access journals BioMed Central (BMC) and Springer Open platforms.

Analysis of 2017 open access journals does not reveals major changes in reported APC, except for Nature Research open access journals where 22 journals saw reduction in APC and one reported an increase. Average APC at Nature Research was $3103.00 a decrease of 11% from 2016. BioMed central APC increased on 4 journals and decreased on two journals, with average APC of $2189.00. Springer Open APC saw an increase on 8 journals and decrease on one journal with average APC stand at $1301.00

In 2017, Nature Research added 4 new journals and removed 2 journals. BioMed Central added 15 new journals and removed 17, while Springer Open added 12 new journals and removed 20. Over 40% of Springer Open journals are fully sponsored.

Nature Research open access journals 2017

On April 30th, 2017, the webpage listed 87 journals under four categories: Multidisciplinary (3), Nature Partner Journals (25), Academic and Society Journals (20), Journals with hybrid open access options (39). APCs for all journals were posted in US dollar, British Pound and European Euro.

For consistency purpose, we compared journals from the first three categories (48) with journals from the same categories analysed in 2016 (46). Journals with hybrid open access were not compared. Our APCs comparison was based on US Dollar.

Findings:

4 new journals were added in 2017 to Nature Partner Journals category

2 Journals were removed in 2017 from Academic and Society journals category